The Customer

The Customer is the largest provider of wireless communications and data networks in the US. The Customer’s B2B and B2C portals are their major online retail channels with more than 1 Billion hits per quarter and more than 250,000 orders a month. These portals are used by prospects to research wireless phone plan offerings, sign up for plans, manage their profiles and services, and pay bills online.The internal business interface to the portals is a homegrown content management system that enables business users to input and edit information such as phones and related accessories, phone features, discounts, rebates, offers, and pricing.

The Challenge

The Customer engaged AgreeYa to manage their B2B/B2C portals and the backend content management systems. The project scope of work included bug fixing, new features development, enhancing existing features, and porting to newer application frameworks. The AgreeYa team was to work as an extended arm of the the Customer’s development teams across the US, and to integrate completely with their engineering, quality, configuration management, and change management processes.

The Solution

For this project, AgreeYa adopted its O3 (onsite-offsite-offshore) delivery model. AgreeYa deployed teams onsite at Customer offices and offsite at AgreeYa offices with the testing infrastructure offshore at AgreeYa’s Global Delivery Center (GDC). Each team had a specific role to play in the project. Detailed communication and collaboration plans were implemented to ensure team integration.The engagement was initiated with knowledge transfer sessions where the team learned the functional and technical aspects of the application set and infrastructure. Detailed meetings were then held to finalize the development process.A VPN-based access mechanism was implemented to the Customer’s network. A complete testing infrastructure was deployed offshore, with dummy simulators to mimic external systems to enable system and integration testing. While teams worked during US time zones, the offshore team was deployed during night shifts for user acceptance testing (UAT), "Go Live", and post-production support.Initially, a business process study was conducted onsite to optimize the travel booking process. AgreeYa then designed a solution comprised of a three-tier architecture loosely coupled using SOA and Web Services. A non-functional prototype of the portal was built to showcase navigation flow, workflow, etc. AgreeYa then conducted a focus group session to validate and finalize this prototype with the Customer’s functional team. A meeting with the technical team was held to explain how and what technology was used to make the portal a scalable solution.

The Results

This is an ongoing engagement. AgreeYa has been working on this engagement for the past three years with continued success.The key benefits delivered in this project were:

Provided the Customer with an on-demand resource pool for managing spikes

A 24x7 team presence facilitated quicker go-to-market

Fixed cost of resources reduced total cost of ownership

Overall, this project resulted in high quality development at a low cost, providing a high return on investment for the Customer.